If you want to behold the perfect case study in how the racist-white-cops-are-brutalizing-innocent-black-people narrative came to be, you can't do any better than the incident that occurred recently in Las Vegas involving Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett.
Bennett was briefly detained after he got caught up in a police investigation of a reported shooting, and proceeded to publicly denounce the cops, accusing them of having handcuffed and detained him for no reason other than his "being a black man." He also claimed that once officer stuck a gun to his head and threatened to kill him.
Police, needless to say, disputed his account. They explained that Bennett was detained for a very specific reason: When they entered the casino in response to a report of a shooting, the first thing they did was tell everyone to stay where they were. The first thing Michael Bennett did was run. That will get you handcuffed every time, no matter what color you are.
As for the part about a cop putting a gun to his head, police said they were investigating that claim to see if it was true. Let's deal first with that claim, as police have concluded their investigation:
A review of hundreds of videos, including police body-worn cameras, found no evidence that the three officers who had direct contact with the NFL star early Aug. 27 profiled Bennett by race or used excessive force, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said.
"Mr. Bennett has a valid perspective as a person who experienced a reasonable-suspicion stop for a felony crime," Lombardo told reporters. "Those who experience such a stop, especially when they have not committed a crime, are not likely to feel good about it."
Bennett committed no crime, the sheriff said. But he was detained at gunpoint, handcuffed and seated for about 10 minutes in the back of a patrol car until police searching the crowded casino just hours after an Aug. 26 boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor concluded that what people thought was gunfire was actually the sharp sound of velvet rope stands knocked to a tile floor during a scuffle.
Video shows an officer with his gun out while handcuffing Bennett as he lies prone in a traffic lane on Las Vegas Boulevard outside the Cromwell casino.
But Lombardo said there was nothing to support Bennett's allegation, made in a Twitter post more than a week later, that an officer put a gun to Bennett's head and threatened to blow his head off.
"From the evidence we have at this point, we don't know (the officer) said that," the sheriff said.
Now if you're determined to believe Michael Bennett, you could always insist the cops are lying, and that someone there really did threaten to blow his head off. But if you're going to believe that, you need to consider a couple of things. First, there are hundreds of videos of what was going on that night, and not a single of them has been shown to confirm Bennett's story.
What's more, the video we have seen confirms that in every other aspect of the story, the police were telling the truth and Bennett was either lying or had such a poor understanding of what was going on that he can't be relied upon in the slightest.
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Here's the most extensive video I've seen yet:
It's very clear what happened here. Police were called into a chaotic situation, as they often are, and they were trying to get everyone to cooperate so they could get a sense of what had happened and who, if anyone, was responsible. When Bennett chose to flee rather than follow their instructions, he not only made it much harder for them to do what they were trying to do, but he gave them clear reason to suspect he may have been guilty of something, and that it would be necessary to pursue and detain him.
When police tell you to stay in place and you run, they're going to chase you and stop you. With guns. And with handcuffs. That's 100 percent on you.
So there was a problem here, without a doubt, and Michael Bennett caused it by not doing what he'd been told to do. He should have apologized to the police for the actions he took that distracted them from investigating the complaint. Yet the next day, he tweeted the following declaration: "Dear World, Las Vegas police officers singled me out and pointed their guns at me for doing nothing more than simply being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time."
That was an absolute lie.
Police at the scene clearly explained to him why he had been detained, and made it clear to him that they didn't want to hold him if he hadn't done anything wrong - but first they had to get his name and his information and find out why he ran when they told him not to. The truth is they could have charged him just for fleeing. He was interfering with a police investigation. That they were not of a mind to do that is an indication of their fair-mindedness, not of some racist vendetta against the big scary black man.
So what do we have here? We have an incident in which a high-profile public figured came forward with an explosive claim, and a lot of people believed him because a) he's famous; and b) it fits the narrative they already want to believe about the police. It made cops look brutish, arbitrary and racist, and it helped to fuel the protests we're seeing at the start of almost every NFL game these days.
Total lie. It did not happen the way Michael Bennett claimed it did
And it was a total lie. It did not happen the way Michael Bennett claimed it did. At all. The actions of the police were completely appropriate and consistent with their training, and to the extent there was anything at all going wrong here, it was because Michael Bennett didn't do what he'd been instructed to do by police investigating a report of a crime.
Now let me ask you: How many other incidents that supposedly prove the police-as-racist-brutes narrative are just as bogus? How many times is a story initially reported in a certain way because someone complains long and loud about their "mistreatment by the police," only to have it turn out that when you hear all sides of the story, you realize that in fact the police did nothing wrong at all?
And how much of the racial tension we're experiencing in the country right now is precisely because people are so willing to believe lies . . . and don't hold people like Michael Bennett accountable when they turn out to be total liars?
